Curzio Malaparte: beguiling chameleon

The half-Italian, half German Kurt Suckert (1898-1957) adopted the pseudonym of Curzio Malaparte, a self-styled evil inversion of Bonaparte.  His father, Erwin Suckert, was an irritable textile-manufacturer from Saxony who lived in Prato, 25 miles northwest of Florence, and married a Florentine woman.  Malaparte published books in Italian and French, but didn’t know German.  He did know some English and surprisingly translated his antithesis, Emily Dickinson, into Italian.

The elusive Malaparte was a Fascist, Nazi and Communist; internal exile and prisoner; Lutheran, atheist and deathbed Catholic convert; soldier in World War One and diplomat at the Versailles Peace Conference.  He was a front-line war correspondent during the Italian invasions of Ethiopia, Spain and Greece, and the German invasions of Romania, Ukraine, Russia and Finland, where “modern warfare was transposed to the reindeer age”. He was also a journalist, editor and publisher; novelist, playwright, filmmaker, director and actor.  Malaparte adored a dynasty of beloved dogs who offered absolute devotion and, unlike his mistresses, made no emotional demands.  Maurizio Serra writes in this superb 716-page Malaparte: A Biography (New York Review Books), winner of the Goncourt Prize in France: “The company of animals was indispensable to him, while human beings interested him only in the moment of struggle.”

A comparison with Hemingway (1899-1961), his close contemporary, puts Malaparte in perspective.  Both men were six feet tall, handsome, charismatic, photogenic in virile and naked poses.  They were attractive to both women and men; athletic, adventurous and aggressive; strong, self-confident and domineering.  As teenagers in World War One they fought against the Austrians in the Italian mountains.  Reckless and wounded, they were decorated with medals for courage under fire.  Only the excitement of combat made them feel fully alive.  Like T. E. Lawrence and André Malraux, these men of action were self-advertisers and mythmakers who created and promoted their heroic image, and became international celebrities.

Belligerent and hypersensitive to criticism, they had short fuses, erupted in anger and quarreled with many close friends.  Malaparte, an expert fencer, fought duels with swords, though they seemed to be honourably settled after the insult and slap stage.  Hemingway, a powerful boxer, had many fist fights.

But they were also capable of generosity and compassion.  Malaparte first admired, then broke with Mussolini; Hemingway interviewed the dictator in Lausanne in November 1922 and satirised him as “the biggest bluff in Europe.”  Like the Russians Isaac Babel and Vasily Grossman, Malaparte and Hemingway were outstanding correspondents in many wars.  They were perceptive, clear-sighted observers whose forceful, brilliant style was marked by sharp phrasing and lucid analysis.  Their great fictional themes were war and death.

Malaparte’s adventures began in 1914 when, aged 16, he joined the Garibaldi Legion of volunteers in France.  Serra writes, “between 1915 and 1918 he was on the front line of the horrifying White War in the Dolomites, first as a soldier and later as an officer.”  His death four decades later from lung cancer was traceable to an attack with German mustard gas in 1918.

Serra strives to come to terms with Malaparte’s complex and fascinating character.  He was a contradictory man with enormous defects and great virtues.  The end of World War Two left Malaparte fuming out of sight, a lonely old volcano of the Right.  His lies were legion but also self-protective, for in postwar Italy he could have been imprisoned (again) and even shot.  His 1945 statements of opposition to fascism and to the war “were one of his most distasteful distortions”.  His 1946 defence of his involvement with fascism “on this point (and on plenty of others) is a tissue of lies”. But there was always a molecule of defensive truth buried in his cocoon of lies.  Alluding to Malaparte’s characteristic embellishment, his writer-friend Alberto Moravia said, “I never really trusted him, even if he were telling the truth.”

Malaparte had “the cynicism and opportunism of a petty politician. . . .  Loyalty was for him a very relative concept. . . . Everybody knew him, but everybody, or nearly everybody, distrusted him. . . . His unbridled ambition, his spasmodic need to draw attention to himself, irritated or frightened audiences and patrons. . . . His shamelessness  reached the height of grandiosity. . . . He would talk of waging war on a country as if it were a matter of a hunting party or his own personal affair. . . . He was always against rather than for something, more at ease in destruction than in construction.”

Personally and politically ambiguous, he “passed from great warmth, even apparent affection, to sudden coldness.”  He inspired more curiosity than sympathy.  “As always on the subject of Malaparte, it was (and is) possible to claim and write everything and its opposite. . . . Armed with formidable failings and ideals, he had “a past full of adventures, contradictions, controversies, ingenuousness, shrewdness, world triumphs and leaps into darkness.”

The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci noted that her books were influenced by the aggressive style and violent themes of Malaparte, whom she knew as a young girl.  Fallaci recalled his kindness and bitterness: “He would take me for walks in the Tuscan countryside and would predict a glorious future for me.  One day you will have tremendous success.  But not in Italy, abroad.  In Italy they will hate you as they hate me.   Because in Italy, in order to be accepted, you have to be dead and buried.”

Malaparte, fascinated by Mussolini’s success and expression of power, liked to puff out his bare chest like the dictator.  Both men had “a taste for solitude; contempt for the bourgeois; devotion to the cult of strength, pushed to the point of asceticism: no alcohol, tobacco or gambling.”  Malaparte remained a fascist until the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, but was not always on good terms with the regime.  In November 1933 he was sentenced to five years of confino (internal exile) on the volcanic Aeolian island of Lipari, 23 miles north of Sicily.  He was not punished for anti-fascism, but for maligning the popular aviator and high fascist official Italo Balbo.

Malaparte, accompanied at first by his mother, wrote that Lipari was surprisingly pleasant: “I am treated very well by the authorities and, aside from the inevitable limitations (at home by seven in the evening, limited space to traverse), my life is normal.  The island is beautiful, the climate extremely mild, the population courteous.”  But he also bitterly complained about the African sun and oppressive wind, the isolation and loneliness.  His sentence was reduced and he served only a few months.  (Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1945, gives an excellent account of his own internal exile.)  Later on, by contrast to Lipari, between 1938 and 1943 Malaparte suffered severely during four confinements in an isolation cell in the Regina Coeli prison in Rome.

He had slick black hair and a face smoothed by pieces of raw steak placed against his cheeks at night.  He hated to be touched and dressed in private.  He shaved his hands, armpits and chest, but photos show his hairy gorilla-like arms.  A dapper dresser, he always wore the most fashionable and elegant clothes.

Released from prison, and without making an effort, “all the women went crazy for him”. The widowed Virginia Agnelli, daughter of the fabulously wealthy owner of FIAT automobiles and La Stampa newspaper, had seven children and “was hotheaded to the point of incandescence.”  Like Tosca, she’d visited Malaparte on Lipari, and their wedding was set for October 10, 1936 in Pisa Cathedral.  But the ceremony was postponed and then cancelled when a quarrel broke out in her family about the custody of her children.  Their love affair finally ended two years later in the fall of 1937, and Virginia died in a car accident in November 1945.  Malaparte also had sexually torrid relations for several years with the Chilean Rebequita Yáñez.  He was jealous enough to lock her up in her room and hide her shoes.  But she boldly jumped out of the window, fled barefoot and was repatriated by the Chilean Consulate in Rome.

His diligent biographer offers some unusually intimate details.  Serra observes that “sex, like food and alcohol, held little attraction for Malaparte.”  He disdained “the ridiculous comedy of a man in heat” and had a horror of procreation. “He fornicated easily, without foreplay or decadent gymnastics,” and his lovemaking “was swift, not to say brutal”.

A demonic creator in war and tumultuous peace, Malaparte said “At night I work, from time to time I get up from my desk, I take a walk in the woods, a mile or two in the rain, in the fog. I go back and work until dawn.  At dawn, I go to sleep.”  Kaputt (1944), his greatest novel, describes the plague of war with vivid horror.  He calls a lacerated Soviet armoured car a “rotting machine and iron carrion overturned in the mud.”  Horses escaping from a fire are frozen to death in Lake Ladoga, near Leningrad, and become gruesome ice sculptures until melted by the spring thaw.  Hans Frank, the Governor-General of Nazi-occupied Poland, is a “cultivated assassin whose delicate white hands seem to have traces of blood”.  The Croatian dictator Ante Pavelic uncovers, “with that tired good-natured smile,” an Adriatic oyster basket containing “forty pounds of human eyes” extracted from his Serbian enemies.

The Skin (1949), which describes the degrading and catastrophic occupation of Naples when Malaparte served as a liaison officer to the tyrannically innocent Allied army, is more savage than Norman Lewis’ Naples ’44.  In “A Modest Proposal” (1729) Jonathan Swift had satirically suggested that poor people in Ireland could relieve their poverty by selling their children as food to the elite.  In The Skin Malaparte similarly states that “to survive starvation, it is better to sell one’s children than to eat them” and the American high command is served a dead baby girl on a platter.

Malaparte was disillusioned with Soviet Russia and loved Communist China.  In 1956 he exclaimed, “I do nothing but wander around, looking, smelling, writing, happy and crazy, and above all enchanted.”  But in Peking he was diagnosed with lung cancer, the result of his gas lesions in the Great War.  Morphine and oxygen no longer gave him any relief, and he confessed, “I need great courage not to let myself be overwhelmed.”  During his slow, agonising death, he was transported from China through Russia and back to Italy.

As Malaparte lay dying in Rome in July 1957, the newspapers reported every hour on his deteriorating condition.  As a token of gratitude for their great care when he was dying, he left his house on Capri to the People’s Republic as a study center for Chinese writers and artists.  But, Serra sharply notes, Malaparte saw and said “absolutely nothing about the grotesque dictatorship that was preparing  to sacrifice millions of lives on the altar of the Great Leap Forward”.

Maurizio Serra, born in London in 1955, is a distinguished diplomat, historian and author of biographies of Italo Svevo and Gabriele D’Annunzio.  He was posted to West Berlin, Moscow and London, served as Italian ambassador to UNESCO in Paris and to the United Nations in Geneva.  Ambivalent about Malaparte, he is both fascinated by and critical of his hero.

Malaparte is the best biography I’ve read in recent years.  Written in a lively and engaging style, it is excellent on the political background, perceptive on the elusive man.  Serra carefully examines the conflicting evidence, asks “Did it really happen like that?  Let’s look at the dates,” and concludes “this is not certain and not even probable”. He concentrates not only on the events, but on what they mean.

Serra is often amusing.  An author “perpetrated clichés on their way to  extinction”.  Confessions were “sincere or extorted”.  “Malaparte was cold-natured to the point of minerality.”  Corrupt fascists were called “kangaroos” for secretly putting money in their pouches.  One brutal fascist “ate a nice bowl of spaghetti alla Bolognese to keep him in shape between massacres”.  During the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, when the defenceless population was bombed and gassed, war decorations “often bordered on the ridiculous, and sometimes surpassed it.”  But it’s a pity there’s no index for Malaparte or his works and no essential photos.  Malaparte’s face on the cover is hidden by shadows.

After all, Serra manages to praise his intriguing hero: “Malaparte is an adventurer of an interesting and rare species, and this is why it is difficult to be angry with him. . . . Despite—or maybe because of—his faults as a man, he became the writer and witness of his time whom we know and who still today attracts the public’s attention.”

Jeffrey Meyers has written about many Italian writers: Dante, Vasari, Casanova, Verga, D’Annunzio, Marinetti, Lampedusa, Montale and Primo Levi.

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